Hao to Learn

Blended learning In 2020, the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic changed people's life. For teachers and students, the most prominent change is the way we teach and learn. When I worked as a teacher during the pandemic, I started to teach online. At first, I thought that online technology is nothing special for me because I had always been a geek👨‍💻 and a big fan of technologies💻. However, the experience of online teaching still gave me something new to learn and I realised that online learning would definitely be more and more necessary and important in the future. (PS: I really like online teaching and it gives me the opportunity to be a streamer😆.) In the ICT module and professional practice module, I have experienced and learned more that blended learning. Personally, I think blended learning can help students do better in their studies as long as we teachers make good course design and preparations and students make full use of it. Moreover, with so many online resources and in...

English Varieties Have you ever been curious about the accents of people speaking English? When I was a child, I was given the concept of British English and American English, yet I was not clear about it at all. When I grew older, I found that people may pronounce a word in different ways and they are all correct.  After knowing the varieties of Englishes in TESOL education, I realised that it is important to accept all the varieties in this global era and know several commonly seen ones.  Pronunciation of Vocabulary Vocabulary is the base of Enlgish learning and mastering the pronunciation of words will help to build a solid foundation as well. However, in China, most of the English teachers are not native spearkers and what is more annoying is that even with dictionaries, there might be differences between the phonetic alphabet given in dictionary and the pronuciation of people actually speak in real life. For example, the word 'identify', in American English, people usuall...

Teamwork Experience Collaboration has always been significant in learning. During many years of learning experience as a student, I have had so many team works which acquire me to collaborate with my classmates or friends. Sometimes, it could be fun as we invested a vast amount of energy into the work. However, sometimes things didn't go well as we expected only because of a small mistake. For example, in the ICT class, when we were asked to work as a team to communicate via a online tool without talking to each other and finish a passage, we chose to use 'vialogues' without actually knowing anything about it. To be honest, the teamwork was a disaster and we barely write nothing in the end. Because 'vialogues' is a video based tool on which we can only communicate in the 'comments section'.  While when I was struggling with our tool, I accidentally saw another group happily working together and made successful outcome with another tool, which was 'Stormb...

First Encourter It is so quite a surprise that I can see a tool that I used to use  before in ICT class. Actually, I saw Duolingo quite often in China and heard of it many years ago. Like the Duolingo English ability test for applying colleges, learning a language, the advertisements and so on. And  the first time I really saw how it was used was when  I was watching a game streamer, Mayumi, who is from Brazil but streams on a China streaming platform. She didn't know Chinese at all, yet she needed to communicate with the audience. So she opened Duolingo and tried to learn Chinese there. Thoug we are talking about learning English through Duolingo in ICT, I think we can also learn something from others' experience of learning other languages.   Mayumi's experience of learning Chinese I firstly thought it was many years ago when I saw it. However, when I wanted to search for a video （start from 16s）  about Mayumi learning Chinese with Duolingo just now, I fo...

To be honest... 😅This is really a tough topic for me. I don't like WebQuest the first sight I saw it ( Because I mistook the website  QuestGarden.com  as WebQuest. It has the old-fashioned website design (with no offense at all) and the large amout of words in each of the WebQuest🤐). So I was trying to escape from the fact that I have to write something about it.  At first, I thought that WebQuest is outdated and wondered why we should still study it. So I tried to search for some information about WebQuest and was so surprised to see that on Weibo (a social media platform like Twitter in China), there are many people who have the homework about designing a Webquest. One blogger shared her  experience of learning based on the use of WebQuest through which she did learn a lot and she's really grateful to and likes the teacher who uses WebQuest in teaching. So I guess it's time for me to put away prejudices and reconsider the role and the use of WebQuest in teaching ...

Why Tools and Technologies? Being a lifelong gamer, I am fascinated by various interesting games and advanced technologies.  Being a easily-distracted student, I am well aware of the importance of a class being interesting.  Being an inexperienced teacher, I am afraid of my classes being  dull and not eye-catching enough to my students.  Personally, I would be more willing to engage and motivated in the class with games and competitions especially in a e-game way. Therefore, the tools introduced in ICT class seem to be able to spice my class a little bit and create some interactions in the class. Among these tools, I would like to choose first and make fun with.  Get Started With Kahoot To be honest, I never heard about Kahoot when I was in China. The first time I got to know this tool was in socialinguisitic course last term. Though I was already a mature adult for many years, the games still aroused my sense of competitiveness. My friends and I were so eager t...

Journey to the Blog Hi, everyone! Welcome to my blog. As a typical procrastinator, I am finishing my first blog very late. 😓 Actually, there is a blog-like platform (but with more other functions) in China people in my age used to use quite often from primary to high schools. Unlike this blog, we did that mainly to pretend to be cool and unusual. So when we were getting mature, we realised how stupid we were and gave up that platform (at least for me). It seems to be a good opportunity to start a real blog here 😂.  Review of David Petrie's Blog In the ICT class last Friday, we were given many blogs to learn and review.  David Petrie's was the one for me and I did find many aspects I like and I can learn from it. First of all, I especially like the way he organised the blog.  Organization and Layout 😊 Personally, I am not the kind of people who like reading a lot, let alone I am not a native English speaker. So a page that is full of words and texts will make...